Volume 16, Number 1

On April 21, 1994, the Honors College of the State University
of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook sponsored a symposium on biological
origins, pitting "Darwinian Naturalism" vs. "Intelligent
Design." Defending Darwinian naturalism were SUNY faculty
members Jeffrey Levinton (Ecology and Evolution), Elof Carlson
(Cell Biology, and Dean of the Honors College), and Michael Simon
(Philosophy). Defending intelligent design were Michael Behe (Biochemistry,
Lehigh University), Bill Dembski (Ph.D., Mathematics, University
of Chicago, currently at Princeton Theological Seminary), and
Paul Nelson (Ph.D. candidate, Philosophy, University of Chicago,
and Research Fellow of the Pascal Centre, Ancaster, Ontario).

The symposium format called for 25 minutes per speaker for
his presentation, with 15 minutes of questions from the opposing
panel. With six speakers, this format entails a four hour program,
and, indeed, the symposium -- which began at 7:00 pm -- was still
going strong at midnight when the moderator Donn Welton (Professor
of Philosophy at Stony Brook) called it to a halt.

The first speaker was Bill Dembski, who addressed the theoretical
basis for design inferences. Dembski first distinguished design
theory "simpliciter" from "scientific creationism,"
observing that design is a far more modest theory than the usual
accounts of creationism. Design inferences, he argued, are robust
and tractable forms of reasoning which humans employ every day.
All such inferences share a "standard operating procedure"
by which events are sorted according to their probabilities. Events
of sufficiently small probability which are also specified are
candidates for explanation by design (or intelligent causation).
Nothing except philosophical prejudice, urged Dembski, prevents
this form of reasoning from being applied to the origin of the
specified complexity of organisms.

The questions to Dembski from the Darwinian panel generally
conceded that humans can infer design, but only when (and because)
background information about probabilities, motives, and other
causal possibilities is available. We lack that information for
organisms, they stressed. Dembski countered by clarifying the
notion of probability he was employing, and by arguing that sufficient
background information was available to ground inferences to design
in biology.

Michael Simon spoke next, on the topic of "Creationism,
Science, and the Law." Simon, whose training includes a law
degree, along with a Ph.D. in philosophy, argued that claims of
design in biology are not proper scientific arguments, but confessions
of failure. Evolutionary biology, he stressed, "is not going
to give up" on its problems, but will continue to try to
solve them by naturalistic means. Simon then reviewed the legal
history of the creation/evolution controversy, noting that many
philosophers had objected to the "questionable" philosophy
of science employed by the late Judge Overton in his McClean decision
overturning the Arkansas Balanced Treatment Act 590. Interestingly,
Simon suggested that while "biological origins" is not
part of biology proper, and while we do not know how life began,
yet, "design is no explanation: current ignorance is evidence
only for current ignorance."

The design panel asked Simon to reconsider his notion of "unsolved
problems" in evolution. We see problems as unsolved, but
capable of solution, when we are certain the background theories
we accept are true. (Thus, the unsolved problem of galaxy formation
is considered genuine by nearly all cosmologists, because they
regard their more general theory, the Big Bang, as sound. Galaxy
formation followed the Big Bang in time; galaxies formed somehow:
the puzzle is to figure out exactly how.) But if the background
theory is false, the "unsolved problem" at hand -- for
instance, the naturalistic origin of organisms -- may be spurious.

Paul Nelson spoke next, on theological aspects of evolutionary
reasoning. We have a picture, Nelson said, that science and theology
have little if anything to do with each other. But this picture
is false. Evolutionists regularly reason from theological premises
to empirical conclusions, Nelson claimed, illustrating his point
by analyzing Stephen Gould's well-known argument for evolution
based on the panda's thumb. The key premise of that argument asserts
that God would construct certain (optimal) structures, but not
others. Darwin himself used many such arguments, effectively,
to persuade his readers -- should the Origin of Species be excluded
from science? But neither Gould nor anyone else knows what an
optimal panda would be, and the suboptimality claim (about the
thumb itself) is entirely groundless. The argument is unsound.

As Nelson was speaking, an audience member began shouting that
evolution "isn't just the panda's thumb argument!" The
moderator intervened, asking that Nelson be allowed to finish
his remarks. Nelson replied that he was merely taking the panda's
thumb argument seriously, and that "surely that wasn't such
a terrible thing to do." The Darwinian panel argued that
Nelson had misrepresented Gould's argument: suboptimality reveals
descent from other forms. Nelson countered that suboptimality
had not been demonstrated, and that homology alone was insufficient
evidence of descent.

Following a short break, Jeffrey Levinton took the podium.
His talk, "Evolution Reigns," began by arguing that
Darwin established the fact of evolution beyond all doubt, whatever
our knowledge of the mechanisms of evolution. The biochemical
unity of life can be explained only by evolution, and the wide
occurrence of "functionless" structures (e.g., pseudogenes)
which match functionless structures in other species can be explained
only by descent, unless one wishes to invoke a monstrously deceptive
creator. "The whisperings of evolution within" are revealed
by such evidence, and those patterns can be augmented by examples
of "selection in action" (Levinton himself has worked
on cadmium tolerance in aquatic worms). The fossil record is replete
with transitional forms, quiescent genetic information is occasionally
expressed (e.g., femurs in whales), molecular phylogenies confirm
morphological phylogenies -- in short, evolution does indeed reign.

The design panel had several questions for Levinton. Nelson
asked about the theory of natural selection: Levinton had argued
that the theory avoided circularity by defining "performance
criteria" for adaptiveness, and Nelson wondered what such
"performance" was for, other than survival and reproduction
(thus falling back into circularity). Levinton denied that performance
criteria all devolve to survival and reproduction, although he
allowed that they were "tricky" to apply. Behe asked
Levinton if evolution really predicted anything. Didn't the theory
follow the evidence around, fitting new data to untestable scenarios
in a post hoc fashion? Levinton disagreed, arguing that the patterns
of molecules and morphology made sense only in the light of common
descent. How did the design panel propose to explain such patterns?
Levinton asked. Nelson remarked that the congruence of molecules
and morphology may be only apparent, as molecular data is often
manipulated when phylogenies are constructed. Levinton disagreed
strongly, but the issue was left open.

The last speaker of the design panel was Michael Behe, on the
topic of "Molecular Machines: Experimental Evidence for the
Design Inference." Behe argued that evolutionary explanation
can travel a long way on the fuel of "black boxes."
When we don't know the molecular details, we can "explain"
the origin of features like vision in much the same way that Calvin
explains how he and Hobbes take to the air in a cardboard box.
It just happens, somehow. But powered flight occurs via complex
mechanisms, and as biochemistry has opened the molecular black
boxes of organisms, it has discovered that they are irreducibly
complex. A mousetrap requires several components to function,
all of which are jointly necessary, but none is which is singly
sufficient. Likewise, molecular mechanisms exist at a level where
no continuum of simpler function leads up to them. They must have
been designed -- and the general absence of testable explanations
for such systems, in journals such as the Journal of Molecular
Evolution (JME) is evidence that evolution has failed in the face
of biological complexity.

In reply, Levinton argued that the scientists who publish in
JME just aren't interested in explaining the evolution of complex
systems. Other topics (e.g., sequence comparisons) dominate the
journal because that's what molecular evolutionists want to publish.
But Levinton did not say where one could go, in the biological
literature, to find the explanations Behe wanted.

Elof Carlson spoke last. He outlined basic criteria for defining
"religion" and "science" (e.g., religion is
faith-based, science is evidence-based), and asked where evolutionary
theory and creationism landed respectively in that taxonomy. Carlson
also focussed on issues of chronology -- something none of the
design speakers had mentioned, except in passing -- and stressed
that only long time scales, and, by implication, evolution, could
make sense of the geological and cosmological data. "God"
does not belong in science, Carlson urged, citing as evidence
the decline of references to a Creator in the presidential addresses
of the British Association (a major scientific organization) in
the first half of the 19th century. God was on His way out of
scientific explanation before Darwin published, said Carlson,
and nothing the design panel had said provided any reason to bring
Him back.

The debate continued in an informal fashion until midnight,
and the participants parted cordially, all agreeing that the evening
was worthwhile -- and worth doing again.